November 26, 2005

Family myths, redux

Judith Warner's column Kids Gone Wild in tomorrow's NY Times is another complaint about the decline of the American family, this time dressed up as concerns about declining parenting. She briefly acknowledges that children have always been seen as unruly and then blithely ignores what she wrote. If children were somehow unruly both before this current spate of malparenting and during, then does that mean that parenting doesn't matter?

I'm not going to excuse poor parenting, but where were the editors of the Times in publishing this anecdotal pablum?